When Howard was making his memorable progress through the "Lazzarettos of Europe," the Abbaye was amongst the prisons which he visited. He notes that there were "five little cells in which as many as fifty men were sometimes massed together." The Abbaye had undergone yet another transformation, and was now the principal military prison of Paris. It was reserved chiefly for the soldiers, both officers and privates, of the _Gardes Françaises_; but delinquents of other regiments were sent there also; and a turbulent place the Abbaye seems to have been in the days before the Revolution. For, up to '89, the French army recruited itself as best it could, and principally from amongst the masses of the unemployed and the vagabond classes. They were bought by recruiting sergeants, or swept into the ranks by the press-gangs, and it may be supposed that the stuff out of which the rank-and-file was manufactured was sometimes of the rottenest. Moreover, there was little spirit amongst the officers to induce them to train up into good fighting-men and self-respecting citizens the peasants, beggars, and outcasts of whom they found themselves in command. The swaggering, aristocrat captain, lording it over the colonel, who was perhaps a mere soldier of fortune, scorned the men beneath him. His military rank, added to the colossal difference in social rank between the nobility and the people, gave him a double sense of superiority; there was no _esprit de corps_, no feeling of comradeship in arms; but, on the one side, a perpetual and galling assertion of authority, and, on the other, a continuous struggle to secure some amount of recognition and freedom. Insubordinate soldiers were continually being thrust into the Abbaye, and there were strange scenes within those walls. In the year 1784, say the authors of _Les Prisons de l'Europe_, two military prisoners were finishing their scanty meal. "Our last day together, Desforges," said one. "You go to château Trompette, I to Valenciennes. "We're in for twenty years of it!" "Yes, and for what, Dessaignes?" said the other. "For a quarrel with a clod of an officer risen from the ranks. Twenty years!" "My dear Desforges," said the young aristocrat. "It is not a cheerful prospect.—Warm here, isn't it? Trees in leaf, and flowers smelling sweet—out there. Out there, where liberty lies, Desforges. Come, shall we be free?" "Free! There are four bolts to the door, and another door at the end of the corridor." "Who talks of forcing bolts?" said Dessaignes. "At what hour do they exercise us?" "At six, as usual, I suppose." "Yes; and once in the courtyard there is but one door to open." "True; but the means of opening it?" Dessaignes whipped up his mattrass, and displayed a pair of cavalry pistols (_pistolets d'arcon_) and a long dagger. "Where—" began his friend. "The barrister who came to see me yesterday conveyed the arsenal under his robe. Now, are these the keys to open a cage like ours?"